Thursday, April 19, 2007

Quitting Access

In Seth Godin's upcoming book, The Dip, he writes about knowing when to quit. Knowing when to get out of a market that is slowing or shrinking. Knowing when to leave an industry, product, service. Seth quotes Vince Lombardi at the start of this 100 page book, “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.”.

"And Godin’s verdict on the great Lombardi’s views? “Bad advice.” ...Godin’s counter-intuitive insight is simply this: winners do quit, they quit all the time, it’s just that they pick the right moment and the right place to quit, so that they can concentrate their fire on an area where winning is a much more likely (and indeed more profitable) outcome.
The book’s title refers to that low point in any task or project where we have to decide whether to carry on with what we are doing - in the hope of overcoming a dip - or whether we should in fact abandon the work in hand and move on. One of our biggest problems, Godin says, is that we fail to recognise when a dip is in fact a cul-de-sac, a dead end. He hails Jack Welch, former chief executive of General Electric, as a boss who knew when certain business units were coming up against a dead end. “Be number one or number two in a sector, or get out of it,” was the Welch doctrine. [source]

What does this have to do with you? Well, two things actually.

The "Just Selling Connectivity" business is coming to an end, so what's your (exit) strategy?

With cable and telco, it is difficult to strive to be #1 or #2, but in Blue Oceans you can be.

What's a Blue Ocean? A Red Ocean is TV, cellular, internet access, shared web-hosting. It's red because it a bloody competitive market. But a Blue Ocean is where you create a new niche, like Cold Fusion Hosting or On-Demand TV like MyTVPal or Akimbo. What's your Blue Ocean? Where's your Dip?